Israeli forces kill militant said to be planning attack

JERUSALEM - Israeli officials said yesterday their forces killed a senior Palestinian commander from an al-Qaida-affiliated Islamist group in the Gaza Strip as he was planning a terrorist attack against Israeli and American targets in the Sinai Peninsula.

The militant, identified as Mohammed Jamal Al-Namnam, 25, was a leader of Army of Islam, a fringe group in the Gaza Strip that has claimed responsibility for recent rocket attacks against Israel and taking part in the 2006 kidnapping of Israeli soldier Gilad Shalit.

"He was a ticking bomb," said Lt. Col. Avital Leibovitz, a military spokeswoman. She declined to provide details of the Sinai attack Namnam was suspected of plotting.

Namnam was killed in car explosion outside the police headquarters of Hamas, the armed Palestinian group that controls the Gaza Strip. Two other militants were injured.

Witnesses gave conflicting reports about whether the explosion was caused by a bomb inside the car or from an Israeli airstrike. Military officials would not comment on how the strike was carried out.

"The sound and fireball were massive," said taxi driver Mohammed Barbari, who said he was driving behind the car when it exploded. He said he escaped harm only because he stopped 100 yards away to pick up passengers.

The explosion flipped the car upside down and left a large crater in the road, witnesses said.

Though Hamas officials criticized the strike as the latest Israeli assassination, their organization has had its own problems with Army of Islam, which is one of several smaller extremist groups in the Gaza Strip that have accused Hamas of growing too soft and abandoning its roots as a resistance movement.

As recently as last week, Hamas leaders warned the fringe groups to suspend their rocket attacks against southern Israel. Last year, Hamas soldiers clashed with another extremist group in an armed battle that killed about two dozen militants.